10 Aug 2009

On Returning to Blogging – At Fifty

I pretty much gave up writing personal essays for the web after I
founded SFLC; just when RMS & I were getting ready for the making of
GPLv3. It seemed to me then that everything I thought about from day
to day was subject to attorney-client privilege, or was the internal
business of SFLC, or was a diplomatic statement that shouldn’t be
anticipated by a personal blog. I think institutional blogging is
invaluable, and I love what my colleagues do at softwarefreedom.org, including
the podcast. My
course wikis at
Columbia are experiments in teaching conducted whth my students &
former students that are teaching me every day. I live in the web.
But writing about the various things that matter to me, in real time,
in the constant process of trying to hope efficiently that all of us
could have more freedom? That’s a habit I had gotten out of.

But changing habits seems to be one of my responses to turning fifty
last month. As my dear friend Conrad Johnson put it, “Fifty is
interesting.” You feel, at least if you got here the way I did, both
quite strong and terribly lucky. The movement I now realize it’s clear
I’m giving my life to is on the verge of irreversibly changing
humanity. I may yet live to see the world I have been dreaming of
since I was still a boy.

And then again, you think at fifty, maybe I won’t. But billions of
people now living are going to live in a world in which every Einstein
is allowed to learn physics, regardless of whether she is rich or
poor. Younger colleagues I work with–more skillful and farsighted
captains than we were, I have no doubt–will win the final victories
after which the ownership of ideas, with all that notion implies in
the dis-empowerment of the vast majority of humanity, has become as
repugnant as the enslavement of human bodies. At fifty just now, in
the first years of the century, I can see both how our long-cherished
hopes are going to come to fruition, and that the timescale of that
process, because it is now only decades from completion, is roughly
the same as that of my own life.

Like many other US Americans this year, in other words, I’ve learned
that I may not ever get to experience retirement. My reasons are
happier than many I have heard. But it does seem like common sense
not to wait, in the older tradition, to publish my memoirs.

Memoirs, of course, are famously read for the indiscretions, which is
why in general, the better the lawyer, the less interesting the
memoirs (with some notable exceptions in every generation among trial
counsel). But I’m not blogging here indiscreetly, a spirit I hope the
commentators too will observe. Without that attraction, all that can
be hoped for what is said here is that it will illustrate how those of
us who are wrestling with the problem of technological and cultural
freedom at the beginning of the 21st century think about our movement
and its goals.

At fifty just now, in the first years of the century, I can see both how our long-cherished hopes are going to come to fruition, and that the timescale of that process, because it is now only decades from completion, is roughly the same as that of my own life.